Tyranny of the majority or elite minority is still tyranny.

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel. ...” George Orwell, "1984"

“In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China; it means people still dream about alternatives, so we have to prohibited this dreaming. Here we don’t think of prohibition because the ruling history has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world — an asteroid destroying all of life, and so on — but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism.” Slavoj Žižek 

"What fosters revolution is not misery, but the gap between what people expect from their lives and what is offered." Chris Hedges http://tinyurl.com/7aedkf7

"News is what people want to keep hidden. Everything else is publicity."

"While it is important to cover the news, it is more important to uncover the news." http://t.co/0jZIkxpv from video with Bill Moyers

Ralph Nader: An Unreasonable Man http://t.co/pszwtRaW we need leaders with conviction like this today @Public_Citizen #OWS #documentary

Carmen Hermosillo had been one of the earliest believers in the new communities of cyber space, her online name was humdog and she lived on the West Coast, but then she lost faith and she posted an attack that caused a sensation online  -

It is fashionable to suggest, she wrote, that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality.  This is not true.  I have seen many people spill out their emotions, their guts online, and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself.

Commodification means that you turn something into a product that has a money value. In the nineteenth century commodities were made in factories by workers who were mostly exploited… but I created my interior thoughts as commodities for the corporations that owned the board that I was posting to, like Compuserve or AOL and that commodity was then sold on to other consumer entities as entertainment

Cyberspace is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as an emotional spectacle.  It is done by businesses that commodify human interaction and emotion and we are getting lost in the spectacle…”

http://ow.ly/626Yk

By Matt Taibbi on Rolling Stone magazine.

My comment

Matt Taibbi is the Dana White of journalism, brazenly bludgeoning Banksters with yet another brash flurry of blue collar vernacular, but could he be misconnecting the dots?

What if his notoriety opened some doors, into the class of privilege and information, where Mrs. Taibbi was hypothetically offered the opportunity to greatly, increase their wealth; in turn helping stimulate the U.S. economy. All she had to do was put up $15 million of her own money, and a private entity (the Fed) would have a country (the U.S.) leverage it to $250 million. Instead of just buying up $15M of cheap distressed real estate, or a mix of foreign and domestic stocks (waiting for the market to turn), she could help make the market turn by purchasing US Treasury bonds with an almost guaranteed leveraged return funded by the U.S. Treasury. -more on the math a bit later. 

Does buying U.S. U.S. securities, from increased money supply, help devalue the dollar? Can it make U.S exports more competitive, and stimulate foreign (job creating) stateside investment ? Does this form of controlled dollar devaluation create controlled (non-hyper) domestic inflation? Does it export devastating, and destabilizing, inflation to poor  nations, thus creating opportunities to advance U.S. hegemony? I would say yes to all of these questions....

...

Atypical investing of $15M, with a 10% speculative return, may or may not yield $1.5M the first year. The same $15M leveraged to $250M at 3% return, with NO 'downside' obligation to repay, is guaranteed to yield $8M each year, regardless of bond value, and  doubling your $15M every 1.9 years! Even with some increased inflation the leveraged return is staggering. Downside risk is the Fed raising the rate too quickly, too soon (before making back your initial investment with a reasonable return on top), and turning your approx 3% profit into a loss. Not too much of a concern if, as the article states, you don't have to repay the principal, but still a huge concern if you are responsible for making the interest payments to the Fed on rising interest rates. Too many details are left out to have a complete picture, but the premise is fascinating.

Maybe a hedge fund manager will set up a fund so we can all help inflate this new bubble into ginormous global devastation.